Check out our New Biography Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/biographics
It’s a staple of cheesy action movies and TV shows—a harebrained solution that is so outlandish the protagonists just might pull it off. “It’s just crazy enough to work,” they always say. However, plans that seem wildly implausible, but somehow manage to succeed, don’t only exist in the world of fiction. Below are 10 real-life crazy schemes, plans, and ideas that really were just wacky enough to work…
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Top 10 Weapons of the Near Future
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Text version: http://www.toptenz.net/10-crazy-plans-actually-worked.php
Coming up:
10. Sweeping up the cash
9. Disguising embassy personnel as a film crew to sneak them out of hostile territory
8. Figuring out how to beat Press Your Luck
7. Dazzling the enemy
6. Using a nonexistent currency to bring inflation under control in Brazil
5. Pretending to be mythical vampires to quell rebellion
4. Escaping from prison… in a helicopter
3. Using lunar gravity, duct tape, and a sock to get astronauts back to Earth alive
2. Holding back the sea
1. Facilitating kidney swaps
Source/Further reading:
https://youtu.be/C1KNi3vVW-8
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/24/french-thieves-use-vacuum-to-clean-out-supermarkets/
https://youtu.be/w918Eh3fij0
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/12/argo_true_story_the_facts_and_fiction_behind_the_ben_affleck_movie.html
https://youtu.be/V7jE5mdq6mM
https://priceonomics.com/the-man-who-got-no-whammies/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28112213
https://books.google.com/books?id=TQ3BBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT41&lpg=PT41&dq=aswang+philippines+lansdale&source=bl&ots=CxE3nwBIl3&sig=K7ujodq1AoXvk8Ked57TZkDl2P4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj5652W6N7UAhUHiFQKHev1B0gQ6AEITDAJ#v=onepage&q=aswang%20philippines%20lansdale&f=false
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2017/06/kaplan-mysterious-gringo-that-escaped.html
https://youtu.be/xcRCBvOOMyc
https://www.nasa.gov/content/members-of-apollo-13-team-reflect-on-nasas-finest-hour
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_Netherlands
https://youtu.be/TlWqNX6iJ64
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_Paired_Donation#cite_note-11
https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/01/30/21/48/burglar-2022159_960_720.png
https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5810/22560011264_caa452552b_b.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Argo_%282012_film%29_premiere_in_Paris_Ben_Affleck_%288092905270%29.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Iran_hostage_crisis_-_Iraninan_students_comes_up_U.S._embassy_in_Tehran.jpg
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JTIuwm7GDAY/VwVgZdzrQFI/AAAAAAAAdPs/WPVt-hQ-g8Uht_mBXeMKAjd0MtoWqwAwQ/s1600/wash-connect-shreds-1.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Carter.gif
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7jE5mdq6mM
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/70/Michael_Larson_PYL_board.jpg/640px-Michael_Larson_PYL_board.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OyWAJt0M4A8/hqdefault.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nzNMCXWCZzQ/hqdefault.jpg

Hello everyone! We've been experimenting with a bit of a podcast for our Biographics channel (a few people were asking for audio versions so they can get Biographics while doing other things)! Fair warning: none of these are new biographies, but rather me having a bit more of a free form chat around the script. I'd love to know what you think, if these are useful, wanted etc :). Thanks, Simon.
Links:
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/biographics-history-one-life-at-a-time/id1450405839?mt=2
Sitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/biographics-history-one-life-at-a-time
Website: http://biographics.blubrry.net/
RSS: http://biographics.blubrry.net/feed/podcast/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/6N9PS4QXF1D0OWPk0Sxtb4
Trolled people: https://open.spotify.com/show/0JzjzwJcRqFZ3BcACtahh8?si=MG5HSm1oT0GTNm_r8_HQcg

They _should have_ put a bunch of sparkles, Christmas lights and paintings of cats on the ships. I'm not sure of the efficacy of this level of "bedazzle", but moral would most likely skyrocketed.
Oh, or they maybe should have painted the ships like giant snakes or sharks or spiders or something... That would have been _sooooooooooooooo_ spooky.

I appreciate you saying, "subscribe if you want to", rather than the usual, "don't forget to subscribe". As if the possibility I may not enjoy the video, and not wish to see any more of said person's content, does not exist. Overall, you do have some of the most consistently interesting and well made videos I've seen. Thanks, keep it up.

Don't you mean "cartwheelers"? Flipping from one to another of various info sources, nearly simultaneously, looking for critical information. It is a term used in law research by attorneys and paralegals, law secretaries & students researching and cross referencing back when flipping through books was the way to get la briefs, theory, dissertations, procedure and protocol, citations, or essays done well.
I can't find "carpet wheeling" in the Almighty O. E. D. OR the internet at large, therefore it must not exist, even in slang.

My parents always tell me stories from the time of the super inflation... Those were hard times...
And the first real bills were not the ones you showed on the video. Those are more recent, created to imitate the Euro bills (Brazilians and our thing about thinking that anything that comes from another country is better than what we make here... 🙄)

Juan Pujol Garcia, who became a double agent in World War Two _on his own initiative._ He won the Nazis' trust and they gave him as wad of cash and sent him to England to set up a spy network. Instead, he moved to Portugal and started sending bogus reports. When the British found out about him, they were so impressed that they hired him to keep it up. After the war, one of his proudest possessions was the medal the Nazis awarded him just before the end: the Iron Cross for distinguished service.

about the last one. the donor change sounds a lot like going from a natural economy to a monetary economy. I sell a car and want carrots but the one who wants my car has eggs. I can then sell my car for money to the egg farmer and use them to buy carrots. It may sound like a crazy idea, but we have done that in Sweden since before the Viking Age

Oh Walmarts an easy grocery target. I worked there as a cashier for 5 years in my younger days. One day I had 70 hundred dollar bills in my drawer and the 20s stacked so high they wouldn't fit. Over 10k easy. I alerted management that I had too much money but they were too lazy to come and get it. If someone tried to rob you they tell you in the training to "pretend to faint". No thanks people who pay me 6 dollars an hour. I'm not busting my head to make a faint look real. The robber can have the money gift wrapped with my blessing.

I have a kidney I'm not really using, and I would totally SELL MY KIDNEY TO SAVE A LIFE.. _~if the law allowed that~_
...but the law DONT allow me to sell my kidney, so I guess folks needing it are just gonna die from 'burdensome fed regulations'

Brazillians planing? HAHAHA!! Havent seen any other culture where planing is lieatrily thrown out the window several times over during a day. Even worse when you're there for 3 months straight.. Coming froma European engaged to a Brazillian.. One of the biggest problems in the relationship early on..

Jummy Carter said that Argo was 90% fiction.
It was not the CIA that rescued them.
It was the Canadian government.
AFAIK the only think the CIA did was provide false IDs that ended up having incorrect dates on them that would have gotten everyone caught if they had been used.

Obviously the authorities will stop you if you try and will still pursue you if you escape and put you back into jail if they catch you, but as long as you don't commit any other crimes while escaping (e.g. taking a guard as hostage or injuring them, destroy cell walls or steal a getaway car, simply escaping from prison won't add to your sentence.
It's the same in Germany and Austria.

I can't speak for Mexico, but it is also not a crime in Germany and in other countries as well. The reasoning behind this is, that the desire for freedom is human nature so every human will try to escape from captivity.
As long as you don't commit any other crimes while escaping (e.g. taking a guard as hostage or injuring them, destroy cell walls or steal a getaway car, simply escaping from prison won't add to your sentence.
Of course the authorities will still pursue you and will put you back into jail if they catch you, but you won't serve a longer sentence because of escaping.

The WWII raid by British commandos on the Nazi Naval base at St. Nazaire, France utilized an old American warship disguised as a German vessel. They sailed up a seven-mile estuary past numerous Nazi gun emplacements before finally meeting intense resistance when approaching the German facility. The old ship weathered the withering gunfire to ram it's target, the gate of a giant dry-dock. Commandos disembarked and stormed the base, causing extensive damage. Explosives on board the abandoned ship detonated, destroying the dock and the German's ability to readily repair their most formidable battleship, should it become damaged. A minority of the commandos and sailors made it back to England that night on wooden launches that had waited in the harbor. Most were killed or captured. The plan worked because it was correctly surmised that German soldiers would not believe that the Brits would just sail up the waterway in front of them to raid a base several miles inland. To this day, those in military circles refer to the St. Nazaire operation at "The Greatest Raid."

Fun fact, URVs still exist in Colombia, using the same name as well (Unidades de Valor Real or UVR), being a commonly accepted sort of currency or monetary unit in mortages, however they're paid in COP colombian pesos. The financial crisis of 1999 bloated their value making the credits monthly quotas to ammount as much as three times as the houses themselves, leading to many families losing their houses after having already payed them many times their original price.

Actually the idea of dazzling the ships was so that when there was a number of them sailing together it made it more difficult to pick out an individual ship from the fleet, thus making it more difficult to identify and target an important one as the various ships all blended together thanks to the random shapes and lines.

in 1453 during the siege of Constantinople, the Ottomans transported their fighting ships overland and down into a previously inaccessible harbor. This resulted in the Byzantines having to divide their defensive forces into three groups (instead of the previous two groups) as well as defend the least defensible section of the city's circumference.

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